CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Szoboszlay, Gergely |
|---|---|
| Title | The Role of Private Towers in the Thirteenth-century Urban Transitio |
| Summary | As edifices found all over Europe Medieval urban private towers are often mentioned but those in the Central-European region have not been analysed comprehensively to date. These buildings are still frequently discussed from a romantic angle as classic donjons connected to the system of feudal lordship within urban settlements. To address this hiatus and romantic perspective, the main research of this dissertation is focusing on the Medieval Hungary, Bohemia, Lower Austria, Silesia and Lesser Poland with a regional outlook regarding the urban private towers. This dissertation motivated by two research questions: How did private towers appeared and shaped their urban surroundings during the thirteenth century’s urban development? And based on the towers structural and topographical remains what kind of functional role can be attached to them? To answer these questions, I examined the architectural and archeological remains, the topographical distributions and the social background of this building type. This comparative analysis surveyed forty-nine towers and fifty-one mentions of private towers in detail. With the help of comprehensive and comparable data, the towers materialize as a complex urban form with distinctive functional aspects, and the findings also underpin that their main role was the representation of their possessors’ wealth and influence in the city. This symbolic value is traceable both in their foundation at the most prominent locations of the towns in the early phases of urban development and in their formal aspects. As the social stratum that had originally commissioned them gradually disappeared from the urban fabric, private towers lost their significance by the late fourteenth century. However, the present thesis shows that this emblematic structure continued to represent power in a different context, shifting from the individual toward the communal. |
| Supervisor | Katalin Szende; József Laszlovszky |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/szoboszlay_gergely.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University